Odaily Planet Daily report: Aave has released a post-mortem report on the March 12 Swap event on X, stating that a user executed a token swap via the integrated CoW Swap routing on its frontend, attempting to exchange approximately 50.43 million aEthUSDT (valued at around $50.43 million) for aEthAAVE. Due to the trade size far exceeding market liquidity, the user ultimately received only about 327 aEthAAVE, worth approximately $36,000. On-chain execution details show that the transaction funds were first swapped for WETH in the Uniswap V3 USDT/WETH pool, then used to purchase AAVE via the SushiSwap AAVE/WETH pool, ultimately generating about 331 AAVE, which were deposited into Aave V3 to mint aEthAAVE.
Aave stated that the transaction occurred on the third-party protocol CoW Swap and did not compromise the security of Aave’s core lending protocol. The trade quote showed a price impact of up to 99.9%, and the interface clearly warned that it “could result in 100% value loss,” requiring users to explicitly confirm before proceeding. The root cause of this incident was extreme price impact from a large trade in a low-liquidity market, not slippage. As an improvement, Aave plans to introduce the “Aave Shield” protection mechanism, which will by default block any swap transaction with a price impact exceeding 25%; users must manually disable this protection to proceed with high-risk trades. Additionally, this transaction generated approximately $110,000 in swap fees, and Aave indicated that it will consider refunding these fees to users who contact them and complete the verification process.